Hope is the Thing with Feathers
by Mdme Butterfly
Summary: Lucy Westenra throws caution to the wind when it comes to fencing and holds the act as a symbol that she can one day do the same with Mina Murray and succeed. That is, until reality steps in and presents her with a rather cruel lesson to the contrary.


I recently reflected on the scene in which Lucy loses all her ribbons to Alistair's failure to achieve the impossible in a fencing match against a champion. I could not help but see the parallel between Alistair's task and Lucy's own hope to one day win Mina - rudimentary as that hope might have been at that point. She hopes that her charms can trick reality and cause Alistair - and by proxy herself - to win in a game that seems impossible. It cast an entirely new light on the fact that she casts all her ribbons in one bold move and loses them in a failure that is almost entirely out of her hands. That she is then mocked by Jonathan was simply too poignant to pass up and so, I bring you this very short drabble.

Enjoy!

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It was an ardent hope, born in the centre of a wish and doomed - as so many idle wishes are - to fail in the cold courtyard of a cobblestoned reality. As she looked up at Alistair, however, Lucy Westenra wielded that hope like a broadsword, powerful despite its being ungainly and the father of overconfidence. She could see nothing but his success, her belief in her own compelling qualities enough to sweep aside the scientific minutiae of his skill and his opponent. As she leaned to whisper her enticements in his ear, it was her hope that dared to defy the rest and establish quite ardently her belief in magic.

She touched the ribbons on his arm, the investment of her whole self into the enterprise and the mark of her understanding that nothing less could possibly be offered in matters of the heart.

Not him. Never him. She returned to Mina with a smile full of the very same hope.

The first jab of reality was nothing, nothing it all. Her mother's doubts were to be expected, she had never understood, never dared to look beyond her daughter in all her pink glory to the girl beneath, who longed to be so much more - and was so much more - than ribbons and frocks. Lucy looked to Mina and saw her faith there, bright eyes of encouragement, urging her on and always of the belief that she could possess the same brightness of mind, if not the same technicalities. She did not strive for those heights, her comfort that the difference of her temperament was not an obstacle becoming heady in the swirl of her current testing of the fates. In the haze, she quite saw it as the best possible answer for them. That she was not built for surgeries was indicator of everything she could be to her friend.

Everything she hoped she could be.

The second jab hit closer to home, Jonathan Harker's mere presence enough to infringe on her joy, on her belief in the sign that was her bet on Alistair. If he could beat the reigning champion on account of her charms, then why could they not be the incentive for surmounting other impossible odds?

She turned to put a hand to Mina's, wanting at once to steal her away from Jonathan's doubt.

She struck out at his poverty, then, her clearest weapon - and the only one society offered her as an acceptable suitor when Jonathan held all the remaining cards.

Her chin was raised when the match began.

The third jab - the final blow - was the overwhelming wash of Alistair's failure. It hit as violently as the lances of the champion, pointed and - in Lucy's case - unsheathed from the realms of sport. All feeling left her as the wound began to bleed, slowly at first and then gushing into a steady flow of her spirit leaving her body. Harker's taunts pressed the weapon to the hilt and she would have gasped had she been left with air enough to breathe. It was not disappointment, it was denial and, worse than that, a waking up from a folly.

She had assumed Alistair's victory would be hers as well, evidence that her hopes could not be misguided, that her heart would not be wasted in the brutal cold of fact.

The gap between she and Mina grew wider by the second. Reality imposed itself like a sick defiler and no respecter of persons. It stifled her and pressed it's fingers into the gory hole in her side. It laughed with the rest of them and whispered in her ear with a blasphemous violation of intimacy.

As she had done to Alistair, it stooped to use her for its amusement.

Hope, she realised, had lied to her.

_Fin._

A/N: Please hurry along and review, if you have a moment! I would love to hear thoughts on this!


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